A sunny place for shady people: How Dubai became a safe haven for Sudan's RSF
"A sunny place for shady people" is how American journalist Nick Donovan describes Dubai. Donovan's latest report for the American non-profit The Sentry, documents how a network linked to Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” has amassed a property portfolio in the United Arab Emirates valued at $24 million.
Dubai’s tendency to overlook crimes committed beyond its borders has earned it a reputation as a destination for “corrupt individuals who have profited from selling components for nuclear or chemical weapons,” Donovan told Al Manassa. The emirate, he added, provides a banking infrastructure for fundraising, as well as “political support and a safe place where the families of leaders can reside securely.”
By providing “direct material support to the militia, allowing it to establish companies in the country, and using its banking and legal system to raise money and buy and sell gold,” Donovan argues, the UAE treats the RSF as a special category of criminal. This conclusion emerges from a series of investigations he has conducted over the past year, uncovering the network of relations between the Gulf state and Hemedti's forces; a militia accused of genocide and atrocities in the Sudanese war.
A network, a company, and property
Donovan's investigation was driven by a personal question: how does the militia finance its operations and equip its war effort? The answer led him to a group of Dubai-registered companies acting as fronts.
He told Al Manassa that he was trying to understand how the UAE supports the RSF by providing a “legal and corporate infrastructure that allows it to operate, raise money, and use the banking system, while also providing political support and a safe place for the families of leaders to reside securely.”
Those Dubai-registered companies, he explained, are the ones purchasing the Toyota 4x4 vehicles used in the desert and the gold smuggled from Sudan to the UAE. Among them is Prodigious Real Estate Management Supervision Services — a firm The Sentry previously revealed had owned three Dubai apartments registered in Hemedti's own name before they were sold to the company in 2022.
The Sentry, an organisation that seeks “to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy,” found that the network includes members of the Dagalo family alongside individuals under international sanctions for their ties to the RSF. Together, they hold a real estate portfolio of more than 20 properties in Dubai valued at $24 million — several of them inside a single gated residential complex near the Meydan racecourse, a manicured enclave of luxury villas in one of the city's most affluent corridors. Various rented properties reinforce the emirate's image as a sanctuary for the RSF leadership's family and wealth.
Sudan has accused the UAE of providing military support and arming the RSF, and last year filed a case before the International Court of Justice. The UAE denied involvement, and the court dismissed the case in May 2025, ruling it lacked jurisdiction to hear Sudan's genocide claims.
The RSF is led by three brothers: Hemedti, Abdulrahim, and Algoney Dagalo, all of whom are under US, European, or UN sanctions. The force was formed in 2013 from the Janjaweed militias that fought in Darfur alongside the Sudanese Armed Forces and participated in the genocide against non-Arab villagers between 2003 and 2005. Its status formally regularized in 2017, placing it nominally under the command of the Sudanese Armed Forces, though it continued to operate as an independent paramilitary force. In 2023, open confrontation erupted between the two, triggering the ongoing civil war.
Records reviewed by Nick Donovan prove that Prodigious is owned by Abo Zer Abdelnabi Habiballa Ahmmed, who has been under US sanctions since January 2025 as the owner of other companies that financed and armed the RSF. The company purchased two luxury six-bedroom villas in a gated community near Dubai’s Meydan Racecourse in 2022 for more than $5 million.
A circle of family and associates
What emerges from the property records is a portrait of deliberate proximity — a cluster of villas and apartments, owned and rented by members of the same network, within walking distance of each other in the same gated community.
In October 2022, Algoney Dagalo rented a similar villa in the same area for $144,000 a year. A year later, Fatima Adam Eisa Hamdan, believed to be related to Abdulrahim Dagalo, rented another villa on the same street. Rugiya Yagoub Ismail Ali, who appears to be related to Algoney, rented a nearby villa in October 2024. Zahraa Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, a woman in her twenties who appears to be part of the wider Dagalo family, purchased a $1.2 million apartment in the same complex in February 2023.
Further afield but no less revealing: in October 2023, Hemedti's wife, Amna Mousa Eisa Yousif, purchased a plot of land in a luxury development under construction near the Trump International Golf Club for $850,000. Musa Hamdan Dagalo, another brother of Hemedti not currently under sanctions, owns an apartment in Jumeirah Village Circle valued at $1.2 million.
Donovan argues that clustering most properties — whether owned or rented — in a single area “may indicate the possibility that the Emirati leadership preferred to gather them together in one place to provide an additional level of protection.”
On the question of evidence, he told Al Manassa he opted for the qualifier “appears to be related to the Dagalo family” out of rigour, despite corroboration from multiple data sources including phone records, passport data, and social media accounts. The family itself did not deny these connections when approached before publication, asserting only that any residences or private assets had been obtained “legitimately” and that its members have been engaged in private commercial activities such as livestock trading for generations.
That claim, however, does not resolve questions about the origin of these funds. Historically, the family leveraged its security control and monopoly on force in Darfur to bolster its commercial activities, and also benefited from artisanal gold mining by imposing taxes and protection fees on workers.
Advisors under sanctions
A significant portion of the portfolio, estimated by The Sentry at $14 million, belongs to individuals under Western sanctions due to their ties to the RSF.
Mustafa Ibrahim Abdelnabi Mohamed, sanctioned by the EU as a “financial advisor to the RSF and the Dagalo family”, owns a $700,000 apartment in the Burj Khalifa. He was a partner of Musa Hamdan Dagalo in a security company that held shares in Al-Khaleej Bank; a Sudanese institution controlled by RSF leadership and itself subject to European sanctions.
The largest individual share of the portfolio belongs to Taha Osman Ahmed Elhussein, a former senior official in Omar Al-Bashir's presidential office who, according to the US Treasury, pivoted to managing the RSF's relationships with regional actors to advance its war effort.
According to the “Dubai Unlocked” investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Elhussein purchased Dubai properties worth $10.3 million between 2020 and 2023. The Sentry now estimates his portfolio's current value at approximately $13 million — more than half the network's total holdings. Donovan considers him a “vital link between the UAE leadership and the militia.”
He also points to the overlap between family activities and the militia’s operations. In his view, there is no meaningful separation between “family business” and “RSF business,” as the individual managing the company that owns some of these properties is, according to US sanctions authorities, the same person involved in selling gold for the RSF.
The Sentry was unable to reach Prodigious for comment. Its owner has previously declined to answer questions about his role in sanctioned companies, saying the matters were subject to legal proceedings. Mustafa Ibrahim Abdelnabi said he is not a financial adviser to the RSF but rather a “financial director seconded” to the force since 2017, when it was a regulated entity under Sudanese law, and that since the war began he has not participated in “any activities that hinder peace and stability in Sudan.”
The bigger picture
The report does not simply catalogue assets; it places them within a series of four alerts published by The Sentry on the relationship between the Dagalo family, the RSF, and the UAE, building a cumulative case that these properties “shed further light on the RSF’s relationship with the UAE.”.
Previous investigations have documented the flow of weapons and drones to the RSF from the UAE in exchange for smuggled gold. A December 2024 New York Times investigation concluded that gold is one of the keys to understanding the war: it directly finances the conflict, with large quantities transported through complex networks across neighbouring countries before reaching Dubai, where they re-enter the global market. The RSF controls several major gold mines, particularly in Darfur, providing the liquidity to purchase weapons, pay fighters, and sustain the war. A 2019 Global Witness investigation documented the RSF's use of a network of Emirati companies and banks to launder war-looted wealth and move proceeds beyond the reach of international oversight.
In his concluding remarks to Al Manassa, Donovan does not view the property activity as erratic or individual — he sees it as support provided to the RSF from the highest levels of UAE leadership.
He points to what he considers the “most important investigation” he prepared with The Sentry, published last November: research into Colombian mercenaries recruited to train RSF soldiers, including children, which traced the recruitment operation to a UAE-registered company called Global Security Services Group. That company was founded by Ahmed Mohamed Al Humairi, secretary-general of the UAE Presidential Court — a position comparable to a White House chief of staff. For Donovan, that connection is the clearest evidence yet that support for the RSF reaches to the very top of the Emirati state.